Timepieces including more than one motor have been proposed on many occasions. A design of this type is shown for instance in the patent document GB-A-2 005 875 which describes a chronograph provided with a quartz oscillator including two individual driving arrangements for the hands, each comprising a stepping motor and a wheel train interposed between the motor pinion and the toothed wheel secured to the axis bearing the hand. There is thus no direct connection between the pinion and the toothed wheel as will appear in the present invention.
To avoid all wheel trains between the driving rotor and the indicating hand, the patent document EP-A-0 312 946 proposes a timepiece including two multipolar motors, the rotors of which are coaxial, each rotor driving an indicating hand. The rotor of one of the motors is mounted on a shaft which bears a seconds hand and the rotor of the other motor is mounted on the pipe of a cannon pinion traversed by said shaft, such pipe bearing a minutes hand. If this design exhibits the advantage of direct drive in the sense that the hands are fixed to the rotors which drive them, it must be noted that said construction requires very special motors, the rotors of which advance by making a very large number of steps for each revolution, in particular 60 steps. Such motors are not easy to obtain and the appearance of simplicity from the elimination of the wheel trains is compensated by the complexity of the motor production and the motor control.